Articles Tagged with DaaS

It’s that time again. VMworld 2014 opens in San Francisco on Monday, August 25. With seventy-four sessions covering end user computing this year, it’s clear that VMware is as serious about the desktop as it is about the data center. I’ve been looking through the session catalog to find what promise to be the most informative and thought-provoking desktop sessions of the conference.

An advertisement from MyCloudIT claiming to offer a Windows 8 DaaS caught my eye this morning. Interesting stuff. Well, maybe not. Poke a little deeper, and MyCloudIT clarifies that what you are getting is not Windows 8.1, but a “Windows 8.1 Experience.” That is to say, not Windows 8.1, and not even a desktop OS. As with many DaaS providers today, MyCloudIT is offering either a shared RDS desktop or a dedicated remote desktop on a Windows 2012 R2 server in Azure. And well, yes, I suppose Windows Server 2012 R2 does look a lot like Windows 8, but to what end.

NComputing is joining the highly competitive Desktop as a Service (DaaS) business with an extension of its vSpace VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) platform that enables service providers to offer Desktops as a Service at a fraction of the cost of currently available services. At the same time, NComputing has announced that it has been selected by So-net, a member of the Sony Group, for its new DaaS service, which goes live across Japan today (May 21, 2014).

Citrix is twenty-five this year. It’s done pretty well; not everyone can say that they created a market-defining end user computing platform that is used by every major organization in the world—and a few other places as well.

So Happy Birthday, guys, and please take the rest of the day off. Just make sure you’re in early tomorrow morning.

The DaaS (Desktop as a Service) market is maturing, and more great products are being released every day to facilitate DaaS functionality. But just like the foundation of a house affects what you can build on it, Microsoft’s unwillingness to offer VDI licensing for the desktop operating system still presents a major challenge to the stability and growth of this market.

IndependenceIT recently announced that it has partnered with Verio to offer Desktop as a Service (DaaS) to the small/medium business market. While the announcement may not have caught your eye at first, there are some interesting undertones to this offering.